dir. Jonathan Demme
Opens Fri July 30.
When John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, it trod very fragile political ground. Based on a blatantly anti-McCarthyist novel, and produced just as Hollywood's notorious blacklist was gearing down, the film had to prove its capitalist credentials at the very moment it was indicting the paranoia endemic to the Red Scare. The simple question that it posed was this: What if a populist, redbaiting senator were in fact a pawn of Moscow, and his bid for the vice presidency a naked grab for Communist power in America?
In Jonathan Demme's 2004 update, the enemy is a corporation called Manchurian Global, and rather than condemning knee-jerk populism, The Manchurian Candidate now goes whole hog for the liberal variety, hitting lefty sweet spots from civil liberties to electronic voting. (The director even gets in some jabs at genetically engineered tomatoes and the hyperbolic graphics of Fox News.) It's not the obvious adaptation. As Paul Krugman observed in a New York Times editorial a few weeks ago, the clearer parallel to the Communist bogeymen of the mid-century would be Islamic terrorists. And it would be easy to plug Karl Rove or Dick Cheney into the role of the candidate. But 2004's The Manchurian Candidate eschews ad hominem attack, and so (however ironically) this version has lost a paradoxical subtlety. We can no longer imagine that stoking xenophobic fears with epithets like "evildoers" could possibly be a veiled tactic of the ultimate terrorist sleeper cell.
The resulting film is far from flawless--silly flourishes include the painful cliché of the retired professor the hero turns to for advice, and a gross pantomime of mental illness that's lifted straight out of A Beautiful Mind--but it's just as mesmerizing and suspenseful as the original. Meryl Streep is brilliant in a role that's perhaps even more challenging than the twisted mommy caricature her counterpart Angela Lansbury blew out of the water in the original. And Liev Schreiber, who plays "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life" (or some permutation thereof), is perfectly cast and coiffed with a more-'50s-than-the-'50s 'do.
Given the original's formidable reputation as an acute political barometer of the Cold War, much of the success of the remake will be judged on the skill of the screenwriters. The reshuffling of the primary characters does present some difficulties--it's not clear, for example, why anyone would ever vote for an unsexed recluse like Raymond Shaw--and the Democratic Party doesn't choose vice-presidential nominees on the eve of the convention anymore. But the big themes of Raymond Shaw's stump speeches ("We must secure tomorrow today") are guaranteed to echo the language of this week's real-life convention. The insistent rhetoric of security and fear and war without end that blares from television sets throughout the film is perfectly pitched, and if it sounds too bald or too loud to be real, that's because you don't usually watch TV in a darkened theater. ANNIE WAGNER
A Home at the End of the World
dir. Michael Mayer
Opens Fri July 30.
Hollywood hunk Colin Farrell has made a big mistake. He must have thought that this film would give him an opportunity to do some real acting--to reveal the expressive depth and range that he is forced to suppress when acting in movies like S.W.A.T. The formula seemed foolproof: Michael Cunningham, the man behind the script, is a noted writer whose novel The Hours was turned into an art-house hit by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot); Michael Mayer, the director, has a solid reputation on the New York theater scene. So what on earth could go wrong for Farrell? The movie lacks a filmmaker; the writer and the theater director know nothing about cinema, and it shows in every frame of the film.
A Home at the End of the World opens atmospherically in the late '60s. A boy, Bobby Morrow (Andrew Chalmers), is learning about sex and drugs from his mentally liberated brother. In high school, Bobby Morrow (now Erik Smith) initiates a homosexual affair with another student. The mother of his lover, Sissy Spacek, becomes very close with the boys, and begins smoking pot with them. All of this is very sweet. Jump 10 years ahead and Bobby Morrow has turned into Colin Farrell, who is a baker with long, hippie hair. The baker decides to move to New York City and... enough is enough, I can't go on with this. The plot is simply rotten. With a real filmmaker, however, all of this shit might have been worked into something plausible, but in the absence of one, poor Farrell is left wandering through the story like a clueless fool. CHARLES MUDEDE
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
dir. Danny Leiner
Opens Fri July 30.
Here is the plot: Roommates Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) get high on a Friday night and, having seen a commercial for White Castle whilst in their stupor, set out in search of the hideous chain to quench their THC-induced hunger for Sliders. Here are some highlights: sorority girls with irritable bowel syndrome; an escaped cheetah; racist suburban cops; a truly inspired dream sequence involving Kumar and a giant bag of weed; and, last but not least, an appearance by Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris. Here is the verdict: Those who smoke pot will laugh, those who smoke pot before the show will laugh harder, and those who don't smoke pot at all will wonder why everyone around them is laughing. Personally, I laughed hard on more than one occasion--not that I'm admitting anything. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Maria Full of Grace
dir. Joshua Marston
Opens Fri July 30.
Maria Full of Grace would seem to be a very Ken Loach-ish undertaking, although it's unfortunately lacking Loach's down-to-earth human sense of humor. Following an angelic (i.e., stunningly gorgeous) young woman--pregnant and sick of life in her one-factory town--who joins up with the local drug lord for a single trip across the Colombian border, this first film from writer-director Joshua Marston is an admirably restrained, even-handed debut that wisely avoids making sweeping societal pronouncements, shrinking Maria's world--whether she's in rural Colombia or big-city New Jersey--to the small circle of people who directly impact her life. He lets the subject matter speak for itself, without too many direct embellishments--besides thankfully subtle comments linking various kinds of legal and illegal exploitation, and a few stabs at the very idea of a reactive drug policy.
True to his kitchen-sink aspirations, Marston interests himself in the less glamorous aspects of Maria's task, with a particular focus on the nuts and bolts of the process. Specifically, the film highlights the logistics involved in carrying several pounds of cocaine in your digestive system for a 10-hour international flight, explicitly conveying the extreme discomfort (and sheer difficulty) of the task, from ingestion to expulsion. Once the film hits U.S. soil, it makes a regrettable turn toward bloody suspense, and the muddled second half is largely hit-and-miss, spending far too much time illuminating the differences between Maria and her less mature, less attractive friend.
Catalina Sandino Moreno, as the spunky yet beatific Maria, breathes life into what could have been a disastrously one-note role, and Marston has the good sense to get out of her way and lets the woman act. Moreno carries the film, and ultimately lifts a promising debut into a film that flirts with something greater. ADAM HART
Thunderbirds
dir. Jonathan Frakes
Opens Fri July 30.
I would submit that there has never been a good live-action adaptation of a puppet show. Not that I can name a single example, good or bad, beyond this one. Most people know to leave marionettes and Muppets well enough alone. Not so the creators of this adaptation, who felt it necessary to dumb down an already exquisitely ridiculous '60s TV show--powered by "supermarionation," as the title credits used to crow--by swapping the herky-jerky Ken-doll "actors" for actual blond jocks.
The original adventure series follows the exploits of the all-male Tracy clan, a family of puppets who live on a remote Pacific island and operate a futuristic rescue squad. The dapper father directs the outfit, and each adult son has a fancy aerial vehicle, called a Thunderbird, with which to effect heroic rescues. In this version, there's also a baby Tracy, a frustrated schoolboy who really wants to join his brothers in their international adventures. He's pretty dim, but has two sharp friends, the stuttering son of the island's resident engineer and the daughter of the Tracys' ethnic help. Obviously the whole movie is about how the dullard proves his prepubescent manhood with a little help from his friends.
There are, however, two important elements that the movie has retained. One is a distinctly sadistic bent, which requires that a member of the Tracy family has to pass out or suffer smoke inhalation or get thoroughly messed up before his brothers bring him to safety. The second element is the Thunderbirds themselves, which used to look like Hot Wheels on steroids (it was a puppet show, after all) and still look just like miniature models filmed in close-up. Fancy that. ANNIE WAGNER
